Compared
with 1975, South Belfast went down from six seats to five.
Alliance
effectively lost the missing seat, while the UUP gained the seat
won by
David Trimble for Vanguard in 1975.

Thomas
Kirkpatrick won the last seat with 5416 votes to 4712 for Ben
Caraher
of the SDLP, after the elimination of Alliance's Basil Glass. On
the
penultimate count, Glass had had 3293 votes to Caraher's 3741,
with
Cook's surplus of almost 300 votes still undistributed; if Glass
had
had 250 more votes, he would probably have been elected on
transfers
from Cook and Caraher. Warden's candidacy was endorsed without
much
enthusiasm by the remnants of the Ulster Liberal Party but not by
Liberal Party HQ in London.

The
by-election had been caused by the IRA's assassination on 14
November
1981 of Robert Bradford, UUP (previously Vanguard) MP for South
Belfast
since February 1974. This was a crucially important election,
marking
the first setback for the DUP after their success in winning three
seats in the 1979 Westminster election, Paisley's triumph in the
European election the same year, and their slight but
psychologically
important edge over the UUP in the 1981 local elections.

The four
seats won by pro-White Paper Unionists in 1973 divided three to
the
UUUC and one to the Alliance Party. The only one of the four who
was
standing again, Reginald Magee who was now in the UPNI, narrowly
lost
to Thomas Burns of the DUP on the last count by 6514 votes to
6448. The
UUP had almost three quotas, but only two candidates, and their
coalition partners benefited from the transfers.

* Member of
the Northern Ireland House of Commons when it was dissolved.
$ Member of the Northern Ireland Senate
when
it was dissolved.

Murnaghan
had also been a Stormont MP from 1961 to 1968 representing Queen's
University.

The
pro-White Paper Unionists managed to get four seats despite having
only
a little more than three quotas. They were able to pull in
transfers
from both the half-quota cast for independent Unionists and the
final
transfers from Vanguard once the DUP candidate had been elected,
and
Reginald Magee finished on 6690, far ahead of the SDLP's Ben
Caraher on
5038, with another 500 undistributed Unionist surplus votes to be
taken
into account.

Basil McIvor
became Minister of Education in the power-sharing Executive.